CyanogenMod could get per-app “incognito mode” for greater privacy

Don’t like the idea of web publishers placing cookies on your computer and tracking your behavior? You can use “private browsing” or “incognito” modes in most modern web browsers to surf the web without offering up any personally identifiable information or saving anything to your browser history.

That means your browser won’t auto-fill passwords for you, Amazon won’t show you items based on your past viewing habits, and you might miss out some of the other conveniences of modern browsing. But it also means nobody will be able to see which websites you visited by looking at your history.

Steve Kondik says he’s developing the “Run in Incognito Mode” software right now, and hopes it will be built into future versions of CyanogenMod.

When enabled, this feature will let you run apps without sharing private data with that app. It’ll convince the app that your contact list, browser history, calendar, and messages are empty. And even if GPS is enabled on your phone, the incognito service will tell the app in question that it’s turned off, so it can’t track your location.

Kondik points out that the service doesn’t block ads — it’s only designed to protect your privacy. So you’ll still see ads in any apps that show them… they just might not be as relevant to your interests as targeted advertisements.

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I turned off cookies once on my PC but didn´t like it. Maybe because I always have items in my shopping cart at Amazon.com and I don´t want to lose that data.

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It will be very easy to see what this feature do in the background if you know how to program.

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If it is part of Prism then I’m finally getting something for my tax dollars.

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I don’t get it. The PRISM program wouldn’t be giving them any resources to develop CM. If anything CM would have to allocate existing resources to accomodate the program and thus your tax dollars are hurting CM.

Of course, I doubt CM is part of PRISM anyway but Google is part of it. So yeah.

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Nice. Apps like Privacy Guard no longer work, so this would do something currently unavailable.